Many business owners think that EVERYONE is their customer, so they create a coupon, find a monthly delivery system (a coupon magazine or coupon mailer) and hope for the best. But, understanding your target customer can give you insights into how to price, how to promote, how to utilize media and what special offers will appeal to them.

If you are not in business yet, look at the neighborhoods where you are thinking of locating your business. What is the average age and income of the people in the immediate one mile radius? Check out the three mile radius also. If you have a retail business, the majority of your customers will be local to those areas.

If your answer is Generation X, have you made them the target of your marketing dollars? Do you know how to make your message resonate with them?

If you’re a woman business owner looking for financing to start or grow your business, one thing you may be dreaming of (aside from winning the lottery) is getting a grant. Unlike a loan that you have to pay back, or an investment in your business that requires giving up equity, a grant is basically free money that you don’t have to pay back.

Of course, that doesn’t mean grants are “no strings attached.” In fact, most grants typically come with quite a few strings. Similar to scholarships that are given to students to help finance their educations, grants can come from a wide range of sources: from the federal government to a wealthy individual, from a small nonprofit organization to a multinational corporation. What grants all have in common is they’re designed to reward organizations that are doing something the grant-giver believes is important. A corporation with a commitment to women might give grants for women business owners, for example.

In its bid to ensure the people on Facebook are who they say they are, the social media giant has added yet another verification tool. From now on, people who manage a Page with a large US audience will have to complete an authorization process if they want to continue posting in their account.

With this authorization process in place, Facebook is looking to protect compromised accounts as well as limiting the reach of fake accounts. By asking the managers of the Page in question to secure their account with two-factor authentication and confirm their primary country location, the issues Facebook has been facing can be restricted.

What do you get when you mix consumer perceptions of a brand’s quality, value, satisfaction, and reputation, along with impressions of the brand and propensity to recommend it? Overall brand health, per YouGov’s BrandIndex, which has released a list of the brands that top the charts as rated by adults in the US.

YouGov’s BrandIndex score is derived by taking the average of the above-referenced components and ranking the highest brands from 1630 tracked for at least 6 months during a year-long period from July 1, 2017 to June 30, 2018.

U.S. employers added 157,000 jobs in July, and the nation’s unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent, according to data released Friday by the Labor Department. Meanwhile, average hourly pay for workers rose 2.7 percent from a year earlier, to $27.05 from $26.34.

Below are the industries with the highest and lowest rates of employment growth for the most recent month. Additionally, monthly growth rates are shown for the prior year. The latest month’s figures are highlighted. Wage data are shown when available.

Dry conditions, high temperatures, and strong winds have once more spawned several large and destructive wildfires across the state of California. Thousands of firefighters are now battling multiple blazes that have burned hundreds of thousands of acres in the past few weeks, and recently claimed at least eight lives. Gathered below: a collection of images of those affected by these recent fires, and some of the dramatic scenes of destruction left in their wake.

So it came as a shock to the bank when its insurer, Everest National Insurance Co., ultimately refused to pay out a significant portion of the bank’s claimed losses of $2.4 million, offering instead only $50,000 on the grounds that the breaches were not covered by National Bank’s computer and electronic crime insurance rider. In June, National Bank sued Everest for breach of contract and a larger portion of the breach costs in a lawsuit that highlights just how nebulous and unhelpful cyberinsurance policies can be, as well as how little the companies purchasing those policies typically understand about their coverage.

Millennials have been the target of more scrutiny than any other generation. Why? Because as a generation, they are larger than the Baby Boomer generation that clocked in at 77 million. Baby Boomers were a significant force in terms of purchasing power, political direction and now retirement as they have moved through their lives. Millennials, sometimes called Echo Boomers, are expected to have an equal or greater influence on society.

Representing 25% of the population, and 80 million strong, Millennials are generally agreed to have been born between 1980 – 2000. You will also hear them referred to as Generation Y. The youngest Millennials are 18 years of age while the oldest will be 38 in 2018.